Is KDE 4 Stable? (was Re:Linus on Gnome 3.2)

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On 12/02/2011 03:00 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 01:18:49PM -0500, Ted wrote:
>> people not seeing this stability yet with kde 4.x ?
>
> No kde 4.x is fine now.

I'm a long-time KDE user and fan. KDE 4 was hard to like for a few years 
because it seemed that a lot of time and effort was put into things I 
didn't care about, like eye candy at the expense of features that I 
valued from KDE 3, like stability, apps that mostly worked, etc. 
Recently, I upgraded to Fedora 16 from the long since deprecated Fedora 
13. For a few days, I really couldn't use KDE because any GTK app would 
be very unresponsive. I read similar reports on-line and figured that it 
would eventually get fixed so in the meantime, I attempted to live a 
GTK-free existence, which meant no Thunderbird and back to KMail, which 
I had abandoned when it became unusable coincident with the switch to 
KDE 4. KMail is much better now but I still don't "get" the grab bag of 
"funny" names, Nepomuk, Akonadi, etc. I'll have to read up what they're 
trying to accomplish with that.

There were a few irritants that were large enough with KMail to have me 
considering other mail clients until I thought, "Wait a minute. I use 
Thunderbird on three different operating systems. It's *the* 
mission-critical application for me. Why should I have to switch from it 
just because the desktop manager is broken, even if temporarily?" so I 
decided to try a few different desktop/window managers. I had read 
enough about Gnome 3 that I wasn't enthusiastic about trying it, and I'd 
never really warmed up to previous versions of Gnome anyway, so I 
installed LXDE, ICEWM, WindowMaker, and BlackBox. I attempted to install 
XFce but for whatever reason, I never managed to see it in the available 
choices on the login screen.

The GTK issue disappeared with the other window managers but I found 
myself missing things that I took for granted, like the ability to hover 
my mouse over the clock in the bottom right corner of my KDE panel and 
see the local time in time zones of interest to me. Silly? Perhaps but 
that's an essential productivity tool for me. I also tend to have many 
open windows so I've become dependent on Alt-Tab, point and click on the 
list of open windows to bring a window to the foreground. Right-mouse 
click on the background to bring up a list of open windows as I'd have 
to do with some of the desktop/window managers I tried just wasn't the 
same because with many windows open, I usually can't see much desktop. I 
don't want to have to remember to leave a bit of desktop exposed and 
have to mouse all the way to that little bit just to see my list of open 
windows. Virtually all of the desktop/window managers support some sort 
of Alt-Tab cycling through windows but when you have many windows open, 
it's not especially useful to have to cycle through every window to get 
to the last one on the stack.

When I analyzed the memory consumption between the "lightweight" 
window/desktop managers and KDE, with the amount of RAM I have in my 
system (8GB), it was really negligible. I was "wasting" at most 100M of 
RAM to run KDE compared to the other ones so "lightweight" really 
depends on ones perspective. ICEWM wasn't usable out-of-the-box without 
reading docs and figuring out why there weren't any applications in the 
menu. Once I figured that out, it was pretty easy to configure the 
application menu as I wanted but that exposed yet another difference 
between KDE and all of the "lightweight" window/desktop managers.

In KDE, I have the option of seeing my menus by function of the program 
and then the program name underneath it in a smaller font. Certain 
programs, like XChat, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Konsole, Kate, I know 
what they do without having to be told "IRC", "Email", "Web Browser", 
"Terminal", "Text Editor" but others, like Karbon14, which I use 
infrequently, I can't remember the name without being told that it's a 
"Scalable Graphics" program. The whole point of these systems is 
supposed to be to make us more productive. If I have to spend time 
Googling or launching applications that I think might be the one I'm 
looking for instead of just launching an application that's labelled 
"Scalable Graphics", I would be penny-wise and pound-foolish. For the 
sake of "saving" some negligible amount of RAM compared to the total 
pool of RAM I have, I would essentially pay for that RAM the first time 
I had to spend a few minutes trying to remember what the name of that 
obscure application that did XYZ was.

Getting back to GTK apps slowing down to a crawl on KDE 4.7x on Fedora 
16, I kept an eye updates to see if there were any KDE, nVidia driver (I 
use the proprietary binary), or kernel updates and I would test with KDE 
to see if the problem was fixed. It took less than a week for the 
problem to be fixed and I was back in business with KDE again. When I 
run out of system resources, damned Flash is implicated every single 
time. I need Flash in my work so being a "purist" and running without 
Flash isn't an option. I noticed the same issue using ICEWM so I know it 
has nothing to do with the desktop/window manager.

There are a few things that I don't have in KDE 4 that I had in KDE 3 
that I miss.

* I used to be able to sort Konsole sessions, as they used to be called 
in KDE 3, but sorting profiles, as they're called in KDE 4, is no longer 
possible. There used to be buttons in the "Manage Profiles" window for 
"Move Up" and "Move Down" in earlier versions of KDE 4 but they were 
always greyed out. Those buttons have since disappeared so now there 
isn't even a pretense that my dozens of profiles can be sorted. 
Sometimes, it's just faster for me to type "ssh foo-+RB1Aph5k6s at public.gmane.org" than to 
hunt through the unordered list of dozens of profiles for same. I'd like 
to be able to not only sort the profiles but arrange them in logical 
groupings in folders. For instance, I have access to multiple virtual 
machines running on multiple physical machines. One grouping could be 
physical machine -> virtual machine.

* I use Kate like an "IDE", though it's not really an all-singing, 
all-singing IDE like Eclipse, et al. It was ultra-stable until whatever 
version is in Fedora 16. Now, it crashes occasionally.

* KMail is still only barely usable for me. It seems to be quite slow 
with IMAP folders, which it also was back in the KDE 3 days. It doesn't 
report how many unread messages are in a given folders as it used to in 
KDE 3. It doesn't report new messages in my IMAP folders unless I click 
on the folders, which when you have hundreds of folders is a bit of a 
problem. Thunderbird started behaving the same way after I started using 
server-side filtering with Sieve. Other people have reported the same 
problem but none of the guesses have been helpful. The one that seemed 
credible was that the IMAP server, Dovecot in this case, didn't support 
the IMAP IDLE command. That wasn't the case so I'm patrolling important 
message folders manually. Sigh...

* I used to use kdissert, a mind-mapping tool in KDE 3. It has since 
been superseded by Semantik. Semantik seems nice, except when you 
attempt to print the pretty diagram you just created to a PDF. It *only* 
prints what is visible in the window's view port, not the whole document 
and there seems to be no obvious way to do otherwise. That means I 
wasted a bunch of time doing a mind map of a project I'm working on only 
to discover after I'd done that there was no easy way to share what I'd 
done with other project participants, all of whom use OS X. I had to 
fiddle with the diagram to get it to fit within the view port but that's 
fragile because the next object I added, it rearranged the diagram 
automatically. This pushes me some on-line hosted application that I 
don't really trust, bubble.us, so I'm looking for better alternatives. 
I've seen some Java-based cross-platform app but it has the handicap of 
being Java-based, which I'm reluctant to install because every time I 
install anything Java-based, it seems to be a pig and it always seems to 
disappoint. (Case in point: Eclipse. I have a rant about it that I'll 
have to save for another day.) Yet another, "Sigh..."

One general irritant in KDE 4:

* The mouse is "twitchy". I gave up on using a PS/2 mouse and keyboard 
long ago with Fedora 13 because I'd lose control of the keyboard and 
mouse after some random interval ranging from minutes to hours. I've 
been using a USB keyboard and an optical mouse since then. The problem 
has been that the mouse would often jump to almost any old place on the 
screen when given just the slightest nudge. (I haven't tried another 
mouse yet.) This made what seemed like a useful feature, hotspots on 
screen corners to do certain things like expose the widget dashboard, 
show all windows on all desktops, show just the desktop, and show only 
windows for the current application, a la OS X, utterly useless. On OS 
X, this works marvellously well. On KDE 4, it's unusable because the 
mouse seemed to find its way to the hotspots when I didn't mean to have 
it there. I'll have to try this with a new mouse to see if it makes any 
difference.

Kudos in KDE 4:

* Speed, speed, speed - The "lightweight" desktop/window managers are 
supposed to be so much faster. It only takes a few seconds more by the 
time my KDE desktop is ready for use compared to the "lightweight" 
desktops but once it's ready for use, there is no appreciable difference 
in any operation that I've noticed, even with eye candy like fancy 
effects and transparency enabled.

* Configurability - I like being able to configure my environment as I 
like. I don't want to have to use the default out of fear of the distro 
clobbering my changes as I upgrade. I upgraded to Fedora 16 from 13 by 
doing a fresh install. Just to be on the safe side, I physically 
disconnected the drive(s) that has /home on it during the installation, 
which meant a bit more work after installation but I could then be 
certain that an installer bug couldn't screw up my /home. After I 
rebooted after reconnecting the drive(s) containing /home and enabling 
them in fstab, my old configuration was completely preserved. All told, 
the upgrade/fresh install took me about 1.5 hours from start to finish. 
It was pretty much painless but I knew about things like volume UUIDs, 
etc. so I had done some prep work in advance that made things go 
smoothly. After I restored /home to the one I had before the upgrade, 
the only thing that had changed in the look and feel of KDE for me was 
the wallpaper. That was a pretty smooth upgrade compared to the upgrade 
from KDE 3 to KDE 4.

By the way, I don't expect "ordinary" users to be able to disconnect the 
drive(s) containing /home, fiddling with volume IDs and correcting fstab 
after installation, etc. so I have no idea what the experience would be 
like for the average Windows or OS X user. Actually, I do know. They'd 
be completely lost. For Windows users, the upgrade path is buying a new 
machine. For OS X users, it's a bit smoother. I'm not sure I care since 
I doubt Linux will ever be viable as a mainstream desktop OS. Even in 
countries where the cost of a Windows license represents a monthly, or 
in some cases, an annual income, people use Windows because it just so 
happens that those countries have a vibrant counterfeiting market so 
licensing is a non-issue for them.

* UI - I think the KDE team have done a great job of creating a modern 
interface that is competitive in terms of look and feel with the other 
two mainstream operating systems. To anyone who is familiar with 
Windows, it doesn't seem like an alien environment. For instance, my 11 
year old daughter can (and does) sit in front of KDE 4 and with no 
training whatsoever figures out what she needs to do in order to use the 
applications she needs, which are word processor, spreadsheet, and web 
browser. Things work as I would expect them to work.

By the way, I use multiple desktops only because I want to isolate 
certain applications, like GIMP, on their own desktop. GIMP opens a mess 
of windows and bringing one window to the foreground doesn't bring all 
windows associated with GIMP to the foreground as it should to be usable 
so rather than grumble about it, I just open it in its own virtual 
desktop and switch to that desktop by clicking on the pager I have in my 
panel when I need to access GIMP. There might be a keyboard equivalent 
for switching desktops but I haven't found it to be important enough to 
me to find out.

What it boils down to is that KDE 4 is really stable and fast and it has 
features I value. I can't say the same about all KDE 4 applications 
though but the only KDE applications upon which I have dependencies are 
Konsole and Kate. I used to develop pyKDE applications but I don't do 
that any more so I no longer have a dependency on KDE as a developer. I 
use XChat, though I would probably be fine with using Konversation. I 
use Thunderbird and I might be able to live with KMail if I had to. I 
use LibreOffice but I haven't tried any of the KOffice stuff. The last 
time I'd tried, which was a couple of years ago, KOffice apps were not 
even half-baked.

As I think about how I work, I could probably live happily on OS X if it 
were not for the stupid keyboards on Macs and the fact that without a 
coherent way of managing packages, it tends to be more of a pain than 
it's worth to use MacPorts and such to install software I care about. I 
might even be happy enough on Windows 7 for my desktop environment but I 
haven't used Windows 7 very much.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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